


bad kind of butterflies

by shadesoflondon



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: (smut), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Knifeplay, lose-lose situation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:49:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28426545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesoflondon/pseuds/shadesoflondon
Summary: An expansion of the time Alina and the others spent aboard Nikolai’s ship in Siege & Storm. Canon divergence, of course, as well as smut.
Relationships: The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova/Alina Starkov
Comments: 13
Kudos: 84





	bad kind of butterflies

**Author's Note:**

> I want to emphasize the fact that while there is no actual non-con, manipulation is definitely an underlying theme here, and this may certainly feel icky to some people. He’s taking advantage of her. That’s just the nature of this ship.
> 
> I have an idea for a short continuation of this, just another chapter, but no promises that it’ll get written!

_Once, when I stumbled by the hatch, the Darkling caught me up against himself. He might have let me go, but he lingered, and before I could pull away, he let his hand graze the small of my back._

_Mal surged forward, and it was only the grip of his Grisha guards that kept him from charging the Darkling._

_“Three more days, tracker.”_

_“Leave her alone,” Mal snarled._

_“I’ve kept my end of the bargain. She’s still unharmed. But perhaps that isn’t what you fear?”_

_Mal looked frayed to the point of snapping. His face was pale, his mouth a taut line, the muscles of his forearms knotted as he strained against his bonds. I couldn’t bear it._

_“I’m fine,” I said softly, risking the Darkling’s knife. “He can’t hurt me.” It was a lie, but it felt good on my lips._

_The Darkling looked from me to Mal, and I glimpsed that bleak, yawning fissure within him. “Don’t worry, tracker. You’ll know when our deal is up.” He shoved me belowdecks, but not before I heard his parting words to Mal—“I’ll be certain you hear it when I make her scream.”_

⎯⎯⎯

⎯⎯ ◑⎯⎯

⎯⎯⎯

I felt the Darkling at my back as I reached the bottom of the stairs, but didn’t pause and wait. I knew the routine: I went to my room, and he went off to the cabin that served as his office. Only this time he gestured for me to follow him, and bound in chains as I was, I had no choice but to shuffle along.

Ivan pushed me through the threshold of the room. Filmy light from the windows shone in strips on the floor, and three sooty oil lamps flickered from their places on the desk, chest, and table in the corner. The bed sat pushed against the wall, its covers pristinely arranged. This was the captain’s cabin _—_ and where the Darkling slept. For a second time this week, I was in the den of the lion. 

Ivan bowed and smirked before closing the door behind us. 

I watched in agitation as the Darkling folded himself into the chair behind the desk. His fingers drummed over the wood as he assessed me, mouth in a focused line. The floorboards creaked as I shifted closer. “I cannot be that interesting.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, ignoring the jibe.

“Really.”

The Darkling tilted his head. “After the sea whip is killed, we will be going back to Ravka. Yet you’ve been difficult. I’ve had to re-calibrate my plans.”

“Sorry to be a bother.”

The hint of a smirk, dry and empty, ghosted his face. “No,” he said. “You’re not.”

I shrugged. I most certainly wasn’t sorry. My irons chafed uncomfortably as I walked towards him, clinking until I paused behind the barrier of seats in front of the desk. “So how will we return? You’re an enemy of the state.” 

“There are ways.”

“More treason? More murder?”

The chair creaked as he leaned back, rubbing his biceps. “You really don’t understand the scale of what you’re involved in, do you?” 

There it was again. The condescension, the gentle seeds of doubt. All tools in which he used to manipulate. “I understand enough.”

The Darkling raised his brows. He sat forward and rested his elbows on the desk. There was almost a smile on his face, like he was looking at me from above, amused at my expense. “And that’s why you ran off with a peasant boy?”

“That peasant boy is more of a man than you’ll ever be,” I spat.

“He’s a child who wants the toy someone else has.”

And there: the belittling, the speed in which he dismissed any perspective that wasn’t his. The _possessiveness._

“I am not a toy.” I drifted a pace closer, scornful. “I am not a thing to be had and fettered and threatened at knifepoint. Say all you like of him, but he is not a tyrant. _”_

“Would you rather have me cut him instead of you?”

My arms went up in a flash of anger. “Why must you cut either of us?”

“Tell me how I might get your cooperation otherwise. There is no speaking sense to you, so what choice am I given?”

“You’re the one who slaughtered an entire town!”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm horrible, I'm cruel, I'm a monster. You will run out of labels soon enough.” He stood, and I forced myself to remain still as he skirted the desk. In a lazy motion, he leaned back against the edge and folded his arms. “Well?”

I was sick of this. The flinching, the fighting, the unfairness. I hated his silver tongue, and I hated being afraid.

I maneuvered around the chairs so that we were only a breath’s distance. The scars on his pale skin shone against the lamplight, and I looked to them, searching for a crack in the veneer, any hint that I could get through. I felt reckless. There was a wildness in me that sang for blood, that wanted a release of my anger and fear and anguish. “You’re angry at me for being young and stupid and uncooperative,” I said. “Why don’t you do it?” 

While his eyes were fixed on my face, I slipped my hand into his kefta and pulled out the knife tucked inside, forced it into his palm. “Just cut me. I’m tired of the manipulation, you’re tired of the insolence. Do us both the mercy of this instead.” 

He blinked. “You want me to cut you.” Not a question, but it sounded like one. As if humoring me, he lifted the knife to my cheek, and I leaned into the caress. 

“What I want is for you to leave Mal alone.” 

He laughed, disbelieving. A gentle hand came up to cup the back of my neck. Tenderly, he traced my cheek with his knuckles, then brought the knife’s cold tip down like a feather against my skin. The blade curved. Blood pooled. He stared almost lazily at the bloom of red, easing his hand until it ran in a rivulet down my face. 

The pain was nothing, and then it was a sharp spike, throbbing in ebbs like it had a pulse of its own. I winced, but refused to look away from him. The amusement in his eyes seemed to flicker. The fingers on my neck tightened. I gasped as he twisted his wrist, stretching the cut. 

He dragged the metal down my throat with a slow flourish, spreading wet warmth. 

“And just _what_ would you do for that?” he whispered.

Foreboding crept through the spaces between my ribs, alongside my heartbeat, sending it spiraling into a frenzy. With great will, I kept my feet planted firm on the ground. “Anything,” I said, wavering. 

His eyes fluttered closed. The knife pressed closer to my throat, and I knew he could feel my quick breathing against the blade. “Please—” 

He raised a hand to silence me. He moved a foot forward so that I was forced a foot back, nearly toppling onto the chair. “It would be so much easier,” he said softly, “to just kill you.”

I swallowed. “Why won’t you do it?”

This time his smile was bitter, halfway a snarl. “I can’t.” He tilted his head, then turned the edge of the blade so it scraped under my chin. “I am offering you unimaginable power. I am keeping the boy alive. But what have you done for me? What will you do but defy me at every turn?”

I swallowed for a second time, thoroughly unnerved. 

“I should dispose of him, since you will only fight regardless.”

“No. No—”

“Why should I not?”

“What do you want me to say? What do you want?” I begged. Was this another test? Or was he only playing with his food? 

I saw the entirety of the trap before me laid out like a blueprint. I would give him what he wanted, _all_ of what he wanted, and I would hate myself for it. I would sharpen the scythe for my own execution, but Mal would be elsewhere, fed and untouched. It was more than I could hope for otherwise. 

Fighting my hammering heart, I gripped the collar of his kefta and pulled him down. “I will cooperate, and I will forget him,” I whispered. “If that’s what it takes.” 

Did I mean it? I didn’t know.

He sneered, and the skin of my jaw grew closer to splitting. It was clear he didn’t believe me. “Do you think I don’t understand—”

I kissed him.

Our lips met inelegantly, and I was so much smaller than him, so clumsy _—_ my fingers curled in the thick fabric of his kefta, dragging him down farther before I realized what it was I was doing. It was only a second, maybe two, and then I was rearing back into the desk. 

The Darkling, in a moment of uncharacteristic shock, went still. He stared down at me blankly, and I met the look with wide eyes.

I wanted to run. I wanted to flee, but I couldn’t, not when I had made such an earnest plea of cooperation only moments before.

He blinked. He sheathed his knife, silent. Like predator after prey, he advanced on me, paying no mind to the way I shrank back against the desk. A pale hand came to rest on the wood at my right. Another moved to my left. Caged in, I could do nothing but raise my chin.

“So daring,” he murmured. “So fearless.”

Gone was the mildness from seconds ago, replaced now with a dark, flat crush of ice. He loomed over me, leaning into my hair. The soft press of his lips trailed down the curve of my neck. 

“Is this your preferred method of torture, Alina?”

I shivered at the heat of his breath, then the cool wash of air as the fabric of my shirt was pulled aside. My eyes squeezed shut. I swayed on my feet.

He pressed a chaste kiss to my shoulder. His mouth wandered up to the angry wound above, and he gifted me more marks, little nips of teeth. A bright, startling pain rose, like fire, worse than any time that I touched the bite with my own hand _—_ and then his tongue went over it, and the flames became an inferno that shot straight to my center. 

Hushed pants fell from my mouth. The lines of my knuckles went white with the force that I clutched his kefta. “Shh,” he whispered. “We wouldn’t want Ivan to hear, would we?”

I was aware of his slender hands on my shirt, on the desk. The weight of one of his thighs rested between my legs, not quite touching me, but close enough that it didn’t even matter. 

My body was in turbulence.

I had kissed, before _—_ sloppily with drunken army boys, both tender and rushed with Mal while on the run _—_ but there were invisible lines of intimacy that I had not yet crossed, and even though he was hurting me, the Darkling was also unfairly tearing those barriers down.

He was taking from me _—_ sensations that should belong to Mal; he was _stealing_ them. And I liked it.

Disgust warred in me, and fear. But beyond, I felt that thread of verboten desire unspool between us, the ache of loneliness temporarily quelled. 

Mal was a boy, and the Darkling was a man. Mal was good, and the Darkling was a murderer. But it was the Darkling hovering over me, touching me, and I was breathing hard, and I didn’t know what any of it meant. What was right and what was wrong. If it mattered anyways, when it came to this.

His eyes glimmered with dark mirth. I stared up at him, back into the abyss, terrified.

The Darkling, forever a politician, did not waste his advantage. His mouth hit the base of my neck, the place where pulse met skin. Vulgarly, he licked up the line of blood he had smeared down my throat, and I shoved his head away. 

“You’re sick,” I gasped.

The hand barring my side moved to latch onto my hip. “Perhaps,” he conceded. This close, our mouths brushed, but he didn’t kiss me _—_ he picked me up by my thighs and deposited me on the desktop.

I went limp with shock. Was this happening? Was this what I had meant by cooperation? A full surrender?

In a practiced motion, he used one hand to unfasten the buttons of my trousers. My fingers darted out and captured his wrist before he could finish. “Wait.”

For his credit, he paused. He withdrew the hand. But before I could even form words, my hips were being dragged to the edge of the lacquered desk, and he was pressing himself against me. 

I stopped breathing. 

His hips rolled hard, flat, and I had felt them against me before, but not like _this—_

A broken noise rattled up from somewhere deep in my chest. Mal’s face flashed behind my eyes, but it didn’t matter. I had already betrayed him. I betrayed him the moment I decided to save his life.

The Darkling watched me, expression caught somewhere between venomous and victorious. The hand he retracted returned, tearing into my trousers. A sturdy, slender finger slipped along the hidden place between my thighs, brushing once, twice, and the air trapped in my lungs wavered _._ Another finger joined the first. 

I felt like both fire and liquid, like I was melting into a molten pile for him to shape as he pleased. I would do whatever he wanted, I realized. I wouldn’t hesitate to aim a knife at his heart, split open his neck, but as long as his hands were on me, as long as this free fall continued, I was his.

My head fell in defeat against his shoulder. He continued to tease at me, circling his fingers around and around _that spot_ …

And I continued to lose myself. Crumbling, I moaned into the crook of his neck. 

The Darkling froze. I felt him shudder against me, then felt, confusingly, his following wave of rage. He pulled back sharply, and when I thought he would shove away and order me out, he did the exact opposite: he shoved me flat onto the desk.

Maybe I understood it. Maybe wanting a weak, flighty, boy-crazed child was worthy of the rage of a thousand Shadow Summoners. But he obviously did not hate me enough to deny himself. 

I laid prone, limbs heavy and loose with misplaced lust. He looked down at me with a sour half-smile. “Not even loyal to your tracker,” he said viciously.

I sat up on my elbows. There was nothing I could do but glare at him and ignore the fresh pang of misery, because he wasn’t wrong. 

I was loyal to no one. He _made_ me loyal to no one. 

Finding my own burst of fury, I grabbed his collar and jerked him forward. I fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, undoing each until I could run my hands over the bare skin of his chest. He made a short sound, something like an exhale, and I buried my nails into the space above his heart.

A few flicks of his deft fingers left my own shirt spilling open. I felt like a fruit split open, flesh exposed; an offering to the saints; something to be sacrificed and consumed, something fettered and proffered. _  
_

He pulled my trousers down. My boots were still on, but he didn’t even acknowledge them as he discarded the fabric, then did away with my underthings in the same way. I swallowed. Silver eyes flicked shamelessly to my naked hips, fastened to the burning spot in between. The redness of my face would’ve put Genya’s hair to shame.

Still staring at me, still staring there, he grabbed my thighs and dragged me closer. My legs dangled awkwardly off the surface of the desk, and I had no choice but to lift them so they rested around his waist.

He stepped back. Lifted my legs over his shoulders. There was space between our hips, and his palm moved in serpentine motion to fill it. Gently, he rested his touch on my navel.

I made myself inhale, exhale. 

The hand slithered up until it sat like a brand between my breasts. 

He certainly felt the hummingbird beat of my heart, the stutter of my chest as I swallowed down air. My focus trained on the wooden slats of the ceiling, full of splinters and warped with water damage. The crew was milling around above, going about their day, and Mal was up there too, probably wondering of me.

Probably believing I was being tortured. Probably fearing this exact thing.

My stomach turned.

The Darkling’s hand cupped my breast, soft, sure, and the queasiness washed away. I shivered as it tested, lifting, then moved to hold the other in a similar motion. He analyzed me lazily, which only worked to crystallize my impatience, my _anger._

I was being debased on a desk, stripped down to the bleeding, ticking parts of myself, and he was standing with his shirt, pants, and kefta still on, nonchalant _—_

It was his turn to kiss me. 

He likely felt my rising rage and sought to quash it before I changed my mind. In the end, it didn’t matter why, because his mouth was hot and wet and a little more than violent against mine, and his hips rolled _again_ , and I had already forgotten why I was mad to begin with. 

My legs slid leaden back to his sides. I lifted my arms over his head so that the chain of my irons went around his neck, and pulled him down against me.

He chuckled against my mouth, seeing immediately what I had I hoped he wouldn’t: the threat of asphyxiation. He propped himself up on a single hand and pulled the chain off, fine brows arched. 

“The mouse bites.”

“It was worth a shot,” I groused.

If one could look both amused and irritated, he did. Stare still ensnared in mine, he took the chain and wrapped it again and again around his wrist, until my hands were forced together, until they were bound to his arm and he could hitch them above my head.

He did so. He hitched them above my head, and I reminded myself again to breathe. His free hand came up to tilt my chin, and he analyzed me, face bleak and washed of any emotion. When he kissed me, I didn’t fight it.

It was slow and unobtrusive. It was a could-have-been, if the Darkling had been the man he pretended to be, if I had never fled with Mal, if I had never been forced to bear the collar.

He pulled back. Looked at me again in that same hollow, hungry way. Then his mouth was back on mine, but less contained this time. Wetter and deeper, but still slow.

Again, he pulled away. His eyes roved the drawn lines of my face, and his thumb stroked my jaw absently, and I realized: the Darkling was searching for something. 

I didn’t give a damn. I wanted this to be over, and more pressingly to my body, I _wanted_. I leaned up to capture the hesitant crush of his mouth.

The hand on my wrist lifted, and the clink of a buckle cut through the silence like a dagger. He pulled back. I sat up on my elbows to look at him. My body hummed, and I felt light, and a little distant. I was drunk on surety. 

Unceremoniously, the Darkling pushed me back down on the desk. With a dark sort of glee, he pressed his nose to the sensitive patch of skin below my ear. “This will probably hurt.” 

Then he was between my legs. There was the foreign, maddening sensation of hips against hips, and all of a sudden it didn’t matter who he was or why we were doing this. Where was the line between disgust and desire? I stood overlooking the edge, ready to plummet to certain, euphoric oblivion.

“Just _—_ hurry up,” I tried to demand, but it came out as an unsteady gasp. In return, the Darkling bit down hard on my neck, in a place we both knew my kefta wouldn’t hide. A blip of panic cut through me, but he took hold of my thighs, hauled me as close to his body as possible, then began to nudge himself inside.

I couldn’t think. At that moment, the world was nothing but physical sensation: his searing tongue on my jugular, his right hand clawing proprietorially into my hip bone, the scrape of his clothes against my naked body, the dawning rapture between my legs. 

Saints, he was _hot._ And it was only just the tip of him, but that heat spread, filling my chest and face with a visible flush. His soundless pants mingled with my louder ones, and he lifted his head in order to watch me, drinking in every second of my exploitation, my downfall. After a pause, he pulled out, then eased himself in again, his hips spreading the moisture between my legs onto my inner thighs.

Everything about this was humiliating. What did he think of the slickness there? I had never been with anyone; I didn’t know what to do or what to think. And he was painful—he was barely in me at all, and yet I felt like I was being flayed in the most sensuous way possible. 

“Look at me,” he murmured. 

I had, with the utmost deliberateness, squeezed my eyes _closed_. 

“No.” 

The Darkling exhaled sharply. Cool air from his nose ghosted my cheek. “So defiant.” 

If only he knew. His hips moved in a delicate rolling motion, just teasing my entrance open before sliding out and repeating the gesture. It was the worst kind of agony, because it really wasn’t agony at all. I wanted to spread my legs more for him. I wanted him to push all the way in and move until I forgot how to breathe.

“Please,” I said. The winded, wounded way it came out disgusted me. Please end this. Please, please, please _—_ it was the only word I could think, let alone say. 

“Kiss me.”

The order was so icy that I couldn’t stop from peeking at his face. His brows were drawn, mouth firm, and I was confused until I realized that it was masked eagerness. Somehow I could feel the full domineering force of his desire _in_ me, as if he was inside of my mind, making and taking room for himself. _Kiss me, Alina. Spread your legs, Alina. Obey me, Alina. It’s what’s best._

A pathetic, mindless sliver of me bloomed at the urging. I was horrified to discover that side of myself _—_ I was horrified that it had such control over me, because as he leaned down to murmur a demanding “Kiss me,” against my mouth again, my thighs and insides tingled and I wanted nothing more than to comply _._

The Darkling ceased moving completely and leaned over me on his palms, waiting for my submission like a schoolteacher with a miscreant student. The side of his face flickered orange from reflected lamplight, but his eyes seemed to glint with their own malicious glow, as if daring me to cave. There was something so inhuman about it, so cold and dead, like he was a panther or a hawk or a serpent, like I was a prized piece of meat that he was fixed on having. On winning. On tearing apart. 

His head tilted the slightest degree. “Afraid?” 

Yes. Completely. Even the very blood in my veins felt like it was skipping with anxiety, and I couldn’t quite control the heaving of my diaphragm. Everything was happening too fast and too slow _,_ and I felt him everywhere, dragging slick and hot between my thighs, his kefta and half-unbuttoned shirt scratching against my bare breasts, his eyes like crawling _things_ on my skin.

But I would never admit to fear, I would never willingly hand him a tool like that, so I attempted to maneuver as he does, “Why don’t you kiss me instead?” 

A dry sort of smile pulled at the side of his mouth, more taunting than anything else. “You do pride yourself on being difficult.”

My annoyed retort melted when his course, treacherous hand slunk between our bodies and began to touch where I was most feverish. It was only his thumb, sliding slowly in a circular motion, but my hips gave an unwitting upward twitch, and saints save me, I didn’t want him to stop. 

He deposited a kiss to my jaw and whispered, “So be it.” 

Then, roughly, he was all of the way in me.

He was right that it would be painful. Even though I was embarrassingly lubricated, my teeth clenched and I grimaced hard enough to pull at the wounded skin of my face. To ground myself, I dug my nails into the fabric of his back. His hips hit mine again and again, and I cried out, neck arching back. _Saints._ This was—I didn’t know what this was—his thumb was moving gently, but that combined with the pressure between my thighs was dizzying. It was overstimulating.

I was feeling everything around me, absorbing all of it. The smell of burning oil, the sound of labored breathing, the feel of our sweat-slicked skin brushing together would be pressed in me forever, like a flower between pages. And somewhere, the pain began to morph into something low and horribly pleasurable. Like using a flint to light a fire, his hips hit me, sparking, sparking, until I gasped as the flame finally caught and—saints—

What was happening? The Darkling was touching me, and I liked it. In fact, I never wanted this feeling to end. Why had I ever been afraid of it? I wrapped my thighs around his hips as best as I could in order to get him deeper, because I wanted more, more, _more_. I wanted more of his skin, more of his hands on me, anywhere he wanted to put them. Intelligent thought was lost in the wake of whatever this climbing sensation was. It was almost like my light in the way it blossomed and spread, but it never unleashed, only kept building and building until I was moaning openly into the crook of his neck.

He made a sound I couldn’t interpret—a gasp? A moan? A groan? And I knew he was feeling it too.

Gradually that flame became a bonfire, burning blue-hot, and I was flushed and sweating from the heat, my nails scrabbling for purchase around his shoulders. He groaned audibly this time, and the bombarding sensations became too much. 

There was a snap, and I was gone for a moment, everything was gone for a moment, until it came crashing back in clear, heavy focus.

What I couldn’t feel earlier was the desk digging into my shoulder blades, my hair caught under my back, the chafing of his trousers between my thighs. But as he thrust into me, one spot, repeatedly, it still drew breathy sounds from somewhere high in my chest.

The Darkling removed his hand from between my legs and used it to reposition our hips, never breaking momentum. I laid limp and let him have me, losing myself in the rhythm until his head fell back and his jaw clenched, and he too was awash in that incapacitating nothingness.

He was so terribly beautiful like that, even with the faint crisscross of his scars. Imperfectly perfect. The seconds stretched, and loosened by my orgasm, I wanted to touch his face and pull him into me.

Remembering myself, I didn't.

Afterward, he eased out, careless of my soreness. His usually tidy dark hair was a full mess, his neck and chest were shiny, his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were tinted a flattering cerise. There was no chance my post-coitus appearance was as attractive, but he still looked me over with a satisfied air, running the tips of his fingers down my chest and over my breasts all the way down between my legs.

He stepped back, rolled his neck, adjusted his trousers, then stared at me for a moment as I laid panting. My clothes were askew, hair a mess. I looked well tumbled. Sharply, he barked, “Ivan.”

My eyes widened. I scrambled up to find my own trousers and yanked them on, then pulled my coat closed, not bothering with my shirt, just in time for the door to creak open. Ivan stood at the threshold. 

“Heal her face,” ordered the Darkling. He walked past me without looking back, then said to Ivan, “Ignore her neck. And give her a contraceptive.”

Ignore my neck? My hand immediately sought the mark he was talking about, and sure enough, it was sore to the touch. A bruise then, one situated right below my mandible, too high for my coat to conceal. The Heartrender’s surprised glance did not help the flush on my face. 

So I was to walk around with a stamp of shame—or, rather, a stamp of ownership, placed perfectly to compliment the collar I already bore. I opened my mouth to argue, but the Darkling turned and left without so much as a backward glance. 

What did that mean? Did I really expect different?

At a loss, I stood there, fingers folded tightly into the folds of my coat. Ivan cleared his throat, seemingly unsure of how to proceed with me. The Darkling likely didn’t often torture girls then tumble them then order them healed.

“This stays between us,” I snapped. Ivan snorted. He didn’t object.


End file.
